As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, American democratic capitalism is in crisis. The recent financial disaster and the ensuing recession, serious though they are, are hardly the sum of our troubles. The fiscal implosion of the welfare state and its effects on American social, economic, and political life pose a far more serious problem, and we are witnessing the emergence of an unprecedented symbiosis of big business and government that threatens the very foundation of our free-market system. But our political debates about these mounting difficulties have grown badly confused. Those urging America toward a European model of social democracy fail to take note of what would be lost in the process, while the staunchest defenders of the market seem uninterested in the social and moral preconditions for capitalism. In a dispute between liberals and libertarians, the deepest and most important case for capitalism has been lost.

In his January Bradley lecture, Yuval Levin will seek to recover the case for capitalism—a case that draws on many of the same intellectual sources as modern conservatism, that has to do with far more than economics, and that could help us better understand our own daunting predicament.

Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He has been a member of the White House domestic policy staff (under President George W. Bush), executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, and a congressional staffer. He is a senior editor of The New Atlantis, contributing editor to National Review, and a contributing writer to Newsweek and First Things. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and others, and he is the author, most recently, of Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (Encounter, 2008).